When we start talking about evil and God's relationship to it, especially in the light of national tragedies and terrorism and personal, evil acts that have befallen us, it tends to be a very emotional conversation. I want you to understand that I'm sensitive to that. I get that. I, too, have had evil acts done to me. We have all been touched by evil. When we try to determine the truth of something, oftentimes our emotions don't always serve us well. They can be an important source of information, but ultimately, they should not drive the day. When we look at scripture about this topic, I encourage you to keep an open mind, to let God speak for himself, and let's not round off edges that are sharp in scripture, just to find something that may be more comforting, because ultimately, what we should want to find is the truth, whether it's emotionally satisfying now, or not.

To start talking about evil and our approach to tackling this from scripture, I actually want to talk about the trinity. Here's why: Oftentimes, Christians think about the trinity like it's a problem. But it's actually a solution, like we've looked at before.

The Bible teaches 3 things about God. It teaches that there's one God. It teaches that Jesus is God, the Father is God, and the Spirit is God, and it also says that Jesus is not the Father, that Jesus is not the Spirit, and the Spirit is not the Father. The trinity's a way of bringing those things together and saying, "These are 3 statements that seem to be somewhat, perhaps, paradoxical, but they're all taught by scripture." All of the heresies involving the trinity involve denying 1 or more of those. Someone might say, "Well, yes Jesus is God, and the father is God, and the spirit is God, and there's 1 God, but there actually is just 1 person in God, so Jesus, actually, is the father, before he comes to Earth. And after Jesus goes away, he comes back in the form of the Spirit. That's called modalism, where's there's just 1 being and 1 person in God.

I want us to take the same approach to looking at what the Bible has to say about God and evil. We're going to pull out the 3 statements and then wrestle with them. We can't shave off the sharp edges, which leaves us with some tension, often times. This is a tension scripture does not always try to resolve for us.

Here are the 3 things scripture teaches.

God is sovereign over everything, his will is always done, but man is responsible. These 2 things, obviously, seem to stand in tension. If everything God wants, happens, well then raises the question, "How is man responsible?" Well, the Bible doesn't try to resolve that. If everything God wants to happen, happens, then what about evil? Well, that's where the point about God being good comes in.

What we must always do, is come back to these 3 points, these 3 pillars. Any solution that we try to arrive at cannot involve reducing one of these, or redefining its terms. To make this clear, I think the best case study for looking at evil and God's relationship to it, is the cross. Let's look at a few passages.

"In Christ, we, too, have been claimed as God's own possession. Since we were predestined, according to the one purpose of him, who accomplishes all things, according to the counsel of his will." Ephesians 1:11

There's a lot in that verse and I'm not really endeavoring to talk about salvation today and God choosing things or that type of thing so much, thought that's certainly related. What I want to look at is…